WHO hails major gains against once ‘neglected’ tropical diseases

Geneva, Switzerland | AFP | The World Health Organization on Wednesday hailed “unprecedented progress” in the fight against 18 neglected tropical diseases — including dengue fever and sleeping sickness — which kill 170,000 people and disable millions each year.

The UN’s health agency, pharmaceutical companies and civil society groups led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been waging a protracted effort to eradicate the group of highly treatable diseases, which had previously received scant attention and resources.

“It’s really a story of wonderful progress,” the billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates said in Geneva. “A lot of pieces have come together.”

His comments came as WHO launched its latest report on the battle against so-called NTDs.

“Over the past 10 years, millions of people have been rescued from disability and poverty, thanks to one of the most effective global partnerships in modern public health,” WHO chief Margaret Chan said in a statement.

A full 1.6 billion people remain affected by NTDs — more than 500 million of them children — but that number is down from more than two billion in 2010, WHO said.

The effort against the group of diseases intensified in 2012, when governments and drug companies signed the London Declaration pact committing resources to help eliminate the most common NTDs.

Companies have since annually donated hundreds of millions of treatment doses, enabling one billion people to get therapy for at least one disease in 2015 alone.

Before the deal, “we really weren’t organised as a global community to solve the problem”, Gates told reporters, describing the accord’s five-year anniversary as “a milestone in global health”.